I took a look at Highrise HQ following a recommendation by Winston Damarillo. It’s a web-based contact relationship manager (CRM) by 37signals, so it’s all pretty and Web 2.0-y.

Looking further, I’m surprised at how much my hand-hacked Emacs-based CRM can do:

Review a colleagueÃƒÂ¢Ã‚Â€Ã‚Â™s notes before calling her contact at the printer

I do this with BBDB. Not only that, but my system automatically inserts notes into any e-mail I compose to that person.

See all the follow-ups scheduled for this week

Got that with Planner

Set a reminder to write your client a thank-you note next Friday

Ditto with Planner

Keep all important emails from a customer together on one page

I suppose I could do that with mail search. There must be a better way, though…

Schedule a follow-up sales call with a lead in 30 days

Gotcha.

Review all communications with your investors

I haven’t figured out how to do this one yet. Mail folders help. Maybe I can hook up BBDB with my mail search engine…

Build a list of all the designers your company has hired in the past

Can do this with tags. In fact, I can build a list of people who are tagged with A but not B and whom I’ve talked to in the last year… =)

Enter notes from a call with a potential client

Gotcha.

Enter contact info for people you met at the conference this week

Gotcha.

Generate a list of contractors you worked with last year

Gotcha.

See all the people your company knows at The New York Times

Regexp search, easy enough.

Highrise: you can share your notes with other people. I don’t need that yet, and I don’t think I’ll need it any time soon.

Emacs: I can use it offline. That totally rocks. Also, I can do lots
of complicated batch operations, such as composing form letters that
include conditional text, randomized text, and personalized
signatures. I can add arbitrary data fields and write code to do all
sorts of things. I don’t need Firefox or a mouse.

You know, if I just figured out how to translate my setup to the Web,
I’d make a killing. ;)

I’m going to steal the idea of a pretty view, and I’m going to make it
easier to see all the tasks associated with a person instead of
relying on my daily view. I also need to make it easier to mark
something as for-followup. Hmmm… But yeah, not too bad, not too
bad…

Skimming the help.gnu.emacs newsgroup can turn up all sorts of amazing
tidbits. For example, I occasionally write papers using the LaTeX
markup language for scientific documents. This allows me to produce
professional-quality typeset papers, particularly when equations are
involved. (I used that *so* many times in university!)

I just found out that you can click on the typeset document (the DVI)
and jump to the source code. Here’s what David wrote on help.gnu.emacs:

That’s easy. This feature is called forward and inverse search. It’s
explained in the AucTeX manual. If you use auctex just hit C-c C-t C-s
(I don’t know if this also works within the build-in tex mode). This
enables the TeX-source-specials. With the source-specials on, Emacs
will start xdvi with further options. xdvi will start displaying the
page where the point is set in Emacs (forward search). When you click
any line in xdvi simultaneously pressing Ctrl you return to Emacs with
the point on the corresponding paragraph. This works also with other
dvi viewers, but you have to configure them to use emacs server for
inverse search.